4.6.14

WHY IT MATTERS.

Owning a sheepskin in the early 21st century is similar to owning a contract for a tulip bulb in the 1630s. Will it keep its value? It didn’t for tulips and will not, in the long run, for college graduates when the cost for a degree surpasses the projected return in salary. Or, business owners figure out that new hires who attended a classy institution of higher learning are unsuited to integration and success in the workplaces of capitalism.

Employers, witnessing the laughable political views on display at top-tier campuses today, are likely to react negatively. Who wants a New Left or Third Left employee who thinks U.S. wealth is gained by stealing from the Third World; that America is an unsuccessful society foaming with racism, sexism, and homophobia; that capitalism is evil and exploitative?

Methinks he doth protest too much. Here the (ordinarily misguided) mindset of treating general education as something to "get out of the way" might work to those employers' benefit: the economics or mathematics or engineering or programming major can treat Victim Studies much the way those finishing school gentlemen treated compulsory chapel back in the day.

Captains of industry are bound to be seeing through the artifice of a college education provided on elite campuses – such as the recent antics resulting in the elimination of commencement speakers at several schools. Executives with brains will seek graduates from tech universities, community colleges, and state universities located in the remote hinterlands. Here, tuition is reasonable and commensurate and students are not infected with immature, anti-American radicalism.

Not necessarily: the trendy methodologies of the Ivies, and the legions of diversity hustlers, are more likely to be imitated than the adoption of higher admission and completion standards or the protection of an academic environment conducive to learning something.